There were two bits of progress reported yesterday. The first is the announcement of the release of Magit 3.2. I’d describe the changes, as listed in the announcement, tweaks that make Magit more useful but nothing earth shattering. You can check the entire change log for all the details.
Magit is one of the gems in the Emacs crown and if you haven’t yet supported tarsius (Jonas Bernoulli), now would be a good time. We certainly want to keep those updates coming.
The other sign of progress is a post by Lars Ingebrigtsen on the Emacs Devel List concerning the release of Emacs 28. That’s still in the future but Ingebrigtsen suggests that the beginning of the release process is about to begin. He says that in the middle of September (at the earliest) they will cut the Emacs 28 branch and begin the debugging process leading to Emacs 28.1. That’s still months away but getting the process underway is a significant milestone.
Emacs 28 will be a big release for me. First, it reportedly fixes the annoying buffer repaints and flickers in macOS. If you’re a Mac user, this is a big deal. More significant, of course, is native compilation. Everything I read about it suggests that this is going to be a game changer. I’m really looking forward to trying it out.
The naysayers are fond of pontificating on how Emacs is old and dead. Except, of course, that everyone’s trying to copy Org-mode and Magit. Wait until we get native compilation. While all the cool kids are strutting around with their “pretty” GUIs, we Emacs users will be blowing them away as we edit at the speed of light.